Tag: traditions

In All Your Right-Rightness

Posted on by Hilarey

I know several women who hate women’s retreats. It is an interesting event. I’ve had some good times and some not so great.

One I went to as a new mama had worship led by a husband and wife team the first night. He was our church’s worship pastor, and they typically sang together. After the message, the husband dressed up as an old lady to perform a comic skit like a Titus 2 older woman teaching us younger women. He held up his wife’s size-4 Christmas red negligee and said in his falsetto, “If we were having trouble with our husbands looking at naughty pictures on the new World Wide Web thing, we should just wear one of these…”

Forget the fact that I was less than three months from giving birth to my third child and regularly fell into a bed containing every known human bodily fluid… even at age 24, I knew you could not work hard enough to thwart someone else’s contrary desires when they wanted to sin. No one had ever stopped me from sinning when I wanted it. In that moment, I had a violent daydream of throwing over my chair and slamming the door on my way out. However, I’d brought a new friend whom I’d just led to the Lord. I could neither leave her there nor explain to her why we were storming out with our nursing babies.

My daydream must have reflected in my body language because an older woman behind me leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “Shhh. I’ll take care of it.”

Older men and women, speak when you see something. Your voice is needed.

On the last night of the women’s retreat, when only women were there, the worship leader kept declaring that she could feel the Spirit saying to her He wanted to do something really special. She said He was moving in our midst and had something unique for us that night.

I looked at my friend and asked her if she wanted to walk down to the lake to be baptized. She was so new to the faith that she didn’t even know about water baptism. But if it was the next step in declaring her faith—she wanted it.

When I went forward to tell the worship leader that I believed what the Spirit had for us was an impromptu baptism, she froze. When she could finally form a response, it was that she just didn’t know if women were authorized to baptize people. She suggested we wait. She would call her husband, and he would come back in the morning… we could do it first thing. I felt a little too raw to invite back the guy who blamed men’s porn use on the level of their wives’ sexiness, so I opted out.

When we returned to church the following Sunday, after our lead pastor preached on “forgiveness for the brethren” (likely thanks to the older woman behind me who took care of it*) I asked him what he thought about women baptizing people. I was genuinely curious, and completely content to live within the bounds of all the restrictions placed on women.

As a side note, I feel like men in leadership never throw each other under the bus as a professional courtesy since everyone eventually misspeaks and their turn is coming. They call it a conviction to “not touch the Lord’s anointed,” and mostly just preach forgiveness, and it’s easy to be misunderstood from the pulpit. But shepherds who don’t address it publicly are complicit. If an error was publicly clarified when preachers publicly misspoke, we would have more reverent speakers and, more importantly, congregations who were practiced at discerning truth.

My pastor told me he thought it was a good practice that when the Bible is silent on a subject, we should not speak additional rules. He did not see scripture ever saying that women could not baptize someone. Now, I see a hypothetical situation where a woman would not be able to let a man plunge her under the water.

The responsibility and consequence of leading is daunting, so I had no ill feelings toward the worship pastor’s wife who was scared about what role a woman could take. At the time, I merely saw it as quenching the spirit, not a gender issue.

I say merely, but we shouldn’t be cavalier in our interactions with the Spirit who knows the mind of God. We’re warned that it’s unforgivable to blaspheme the Spirit (think repeatedly ignoring and mis-attributing his conviction, even unto death) and Thessalonians talks about extinguishing, quenching or stifling the spirit, maybe by, or in addition to, despising prophecy. Don’t quench the Spirit; we don’t comprehend the ramifications.

But that’s just so scary: walking in the uncharted instead of the written law, letting the Holy Spirit out to play in all the uncontrolled, untamed possibility. What if we can’t control or tame the believers filled with the Spirit?!

We are to discern the will of God


We have mugs and cards that include the middle two phrases of Romans 12:1-2. “Don’t be conformed to the world,” and “renew your mind.” But notice the bookends. As an act of worship—become equipped to discern the will of God.

Here it is: “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God; this is your true worship. Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.”

Philippians 1:9-10 also tells us the goal is to have the ability to discern, or as the Common English Bible states it, decide what really matters.

I know there’s danger when considering experience as truth instead of a fixed point of reference. And some faith movements base truth on feelings instead of doctrine. For example, “I feel good in my heart about doing this, even though the Bible condemns it.” That’s dangerous, because I know I’m creative enough to justify anything.

So, how do we follow the rules when so much is not specifically written down, like whether or not a woman can baptize someone?

What really matters


A few years ago, my Sunday school teacher was talking about the Sabbath and following the 10 Commandments. I asked him, “Didn’t God prophesy that under the new covenant, he would write the law on our hearts?” He sighed, “Well, yes, but that doesn’t mean we don’t still have to practice the Sabbath.”

It’s a common thought—but both Paul and James cautioned that if we seek to follow one part of the law, in order to be justified by it, we have to follow all of it. Seeking to be justified means you are presenting your case before God to show how worthy you are. But I would also look at it another way. Violating others with your temper while you tout sexual purity makes a mockery of Christianity to unbelievers. Keep the whole law or don’t advertise your holiness.

And even more difficult than the 613 Old Testament laws is the idea of truly embracing what Christ called the greatest commandment. Ingesting the command to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and soul—no dark corners withheld. And then swallowing the sincere conviction to love the icky neighbor you think you’re better than as yourself. If we filtered every action through those two, we would not hurt so many others, or so readily justify war.

The right wrongness


I’m not saying to ignore the law. Jesus said whoever sets aside the least command or teaches others to do the same will be the least in heaven in Matthew 5:19-20. But he finishes with the warning that you are going to need more righteousness than those who keep and teach the laws to enter heaven.

What I believe really matters: is don’t scramble to do right before God at the expense of humans.

The law love in Romans 14 talks about holding fast to your conviction regarding what you eat. It had to do with meat killed in ritual worship of gods. Paul says your freedom to eat meat sacrificed to idols could cause a brother or sister to stumble. And if you cause someone to stumble, you’re not walking according to love.

We could look at this verse about meat in a couple of ways. First, we could count it up as a law we accidentally always followed, and brag about how holy we are because our burger was not killed in worship of Jupiter. (Although, the next generation might say it was slaughtered on the altar of capitalism.) Or second, we could argue that the Bible is irrelevant to our modern lives.

But even though we don’t have a pagan temple in the middle of our city sacrificing animals to Jupiter, the heart of this message is still relevant if we sympathize with the emotional reaction a first century, new believer might have felt if they previously took part in those rituals. (We participate in a symbolic and often emotional ritual when we celebrate the Eucharist.) The first-century new convert no longer wants to be associated with their former deity. They see participation as returning to enslavement.

In contrast, you want them to see that they’re not subjugated to the faith system they left. They have freedom in Christ to eat anything and glorify God for the food.

You both actually want the same thing, but there’s an impasse about how to get there. Do you eat the meat to show them your freedom? “Do not destroy, by what you eat, someone for whom Christ died,” and a few verses later, “Do not tear down God‘s work because of food.” Even though you can eat it and they should be able to eat it, doing what is right is not as important as loving them.

Your rules, lack of rules, extra convictions, and obedience to the law should not destroy the faith of someone for whom Christ died. The law of love supersedes.

Here’s how I might see this applying today. One believer is convicted that we should not exploit the crops of indigenous people, destroy the earth we’re supposed to steward with packaging and transporting food, or eat animals who show affection and fear. When I’m with someone who has a strong conviction and looks to me as a believer to uphold their idea of godliness—maybe, according to my faith—I should eat as them as a way to eat with them.

Yet, even this is not a rule. There might come a time when someone is weeping over their plate and they need to be set free. Your dogmatism, coupled with thinking that you are more right, will cause just as much pain by abstaining. Oh, the wildness of the Holy Spirit. You’re just going to have to pray in the moment for direction. But it is from him, you’re going to be free, and it’s going to be in love.

The wrong rightness

Pharisee is a word for evangelicals that conjures an evil villain for anyone who went to Sunday school as a child. And we quickly condemn the caricature as a bad guy. But ignore the bearded guy with fringes on his garment and substitute the word Pastor or Shepherd for the word Pharisee. They were the spiritual leaders and scripture interpreters.

Plus, if you’ve been in a religious space more than a minute, you’re more likely to be a Pharisee than not. Afterall, we are the church.

Ask yourself if all the men who’d dedicated their lives to studying scripture and leading Israel were actually filled with bloodlust and hate. Could some of them have been trying very hard to do what was right before God? I think the Pharisees and Sadducees really wanted to do the most-right, right-thing all the time. And, they desired to lead correctly.

But here’s how that played out. They were so careful to pinch off a portion of their herb garden, to tithe mint and rue and follow the law—but then when their elderly parents needed financial help they said, “Sorry, I already gave to God anything I might have given to you.” Jesus condemned this, but not because he was against tithing.

The Pharisees also wanted to honor the Sabbath. Don’t underestimate how important this was.

Super brief and ignorant summary of a volatile topic: God wanted his creation to rest every seventh day, to let the earth rest every seven years by not farming, and to return all property and release all slaves every 49 years (7×7) and call the following year, the 50th, The Year of Jubilee. This was so important to God that when Israel failed to do it, they were exiled to Babylon for 70 years to pay recompense for the 490 years of disobedience. The exile let the land rest for the missed Sabbaths. Even though there had been some loss of Jewish control over part of the land during the divided Kingdom after Solomon died and the Assyrian Conquest, being conquered and exiled by Babylon was the most decisive loss of Jewish sovereignty. Jewish ownership of the land was tied to obedience to God’s covenant; as promised, it was revoked when they disobeyed.

This is how it looks to me when spiritual leaders and scripture interpreters use Sunday morning to emphasize their stance on hermeneutics. Parsing out every jot and tittle, concerned with reading doctrinal statements to make sure everyone knows where they stand on issues. Angst for correctness while people leave the sanctuary in tears. Good thing you’re right, church, and everybody knows it. You’re doing great keeping the law.

Exodus 19:5-6 | Deuteronomy 4:40 | Deuteronomy 28:1-9 | Joshua 1:7-8

So, sticking to the Sabbath was a pretty significant doctrine when Israel was occupied by Rome and Jesus walked the earth. I think we downplay the sincere angst the spiritual leaders would have felt. Keep this in mind when you picture them insisting on keeping the Sabbath. The stakes are high. The leaders must keep everyone in exactitude with the law.

You are not supposed to work on the Sabbath. And Jesus kept breaking this rule in preference to human need. In this scene, Jesus and his disciples are walking through a field, hungry. Some disciples grab grain and eat it raw. Technically, this is harvesting.

Technically right, and technically righteous.

Yet, weren’t they a little off? Lifting hand from bowl-to-mouth wasn’t less work than lifting from plant-to-mouth.

The Pharisees had so much zeal for correctness; instead of discerning what truly mattered.

So, about those rules…

The Pharisees should have tithed and shown mercy. But when it comes down to it, God desires mercy over sacrifice. Jesus told the Pharisees to ponder the concept because he didn’t come for the people who get it right.

The world will know we are Christ-disciples by our love, but sometimes it seems like churches would rather be known by their doctrinal statements.

I had this concept affirmed on a podcast recently where the guest, Amy Byrd, discussed having to do some internal work about what drew her to a particular denomination where she worshiped for 15 years. She described her belief that “theological precision brought her closer to God, that precision was sanctification…”

So here I wrestle, one foot out of an issue-driven church convinced that sanctification is through adherence to gender roles. The spiritual leaders and law interpreters reiterate doctrines with zeal and fervor. They have good hearts, and much is at stake.

When my husband and I lived in Prague, we spent time with missionaries who often ignored the interpretations of their sending church. For whatever reason, they let me know when they were doing it. I also have friends who went to missionary school. While they were drowning in doctrinal precision, they were told by other missionaries, “Don’t worry, it’s different on the field.” I bet household codes are just not as important in trenches. I think church is just a thing you do on Sunday; the rest of the week is beyond the churchyard.

Christ called John the Baptist a reed in the wind when John doubted and wanted clarification. I feel camaraderie with John.

Because the winds of doctrine that buffet us are also inside the church. The issues the local church wants to exalt will knock you around just as much, and enough wind will uproot a strong tree. I want to bend on the extraneous, non-salvation issues, rather than push someone who Christ died for to the snapping point. After all, Christ did not come to break off the bruised reeds or snuff out the smoldering wicks.

Here’s to living the windy wild. Mercy, not sacrifice. Love, not getting it right.

Oh, but you should still Sabbath…

Of Mystics and Medicine

Posted on by Hilarey

I heard in a recent sermon that “we will not find peace through meditation.” The context was that peace comes from God, not things of the world. It got me thinking.

I was probably around seven when I first started joining my dad in karate. One of my favorite childhood memories was an evening bike ride to the old building where sweaty men punched and grunted at each other.

This would’ve been the early 80s, and a lot of the guys who trained had been GIs stationed somewhere in Asia. They brought martial arts practice home after their enlistment. “Everybody’s Kung Fu fighting.”

They brought home other things as well. One being an affinity for Asian culture, because of the impact on that age of their life. And meditation was a big part of these early karate classes. I remember my dad teaching me to sit cross-legged and meditate before I was old enough to go to school. It was his solution whenever I said that I couldn’t sleep.

It wasn’t like the guided meditation I use now. We sat still and straight, and there was complete silence for at least five minutes at the beginning and end of every class. Mostly silent… sometimes the panting of people who had just free-sparred. Then, a jarring handclap, which echoed through the room, signaled our stop. I remember asking my dad what I was supposed to think about when we were meditating. He told me that was a good question, and I felt great pleasure in asking and thinking about the right thing. His answer was to think of something beautiful, like a sunset or a wave crashing on a beach. But as he was beginning to seek God, he later told me to meditate on scripture.

Since then, most of my religious teaching has been that Eastern meditation like this is very dangerous. So dangerous, you should at least be skeptical and maybe not meditate at all. That’s why I rejected yoga until I was almost 40. It sounds funny out loud, but the idea was that: if the enemy has copied anything of God—you should abstain from it. I spent time in a denomination that believed in cessation. They used the fact that prophecy and the gift of tongues were counterfeited in pagan religions—so it should have no place among believers. If the world finds benefit in it, you should not touch. God is enough. 

Within our homeschool community, there was an analogy that a banker never studies counterfeit money. They focus only on actual, true money so they aren’t confused about what is real when something else comes their way. They know only inerrant truth, and can spot the fake a mile away. This is one reason some faiths discourage higher (secular) education.

This incestuous silo produces church kids who graduate, get married and work for the church bookstore, coffee shop or pastoral staff without ever leaving the churchyard. But at least they marry as virgins! 

A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23 is a sweet little book that was much like listening to an elderly pastor tell anecdotes about why humans are like sheep. I found some lovely nuggets in it, but I realized how pervasive the concept is for our American church not to look outside… our American church.

The author writes, “In the Christian life, most of our contamination by the world, by sin, by that which would defile and disease us spiritually comes through our minds. It is a case of mind meeting mind to transmit ideas, concepts, and attitudes that may be damaging. Often it is when we “get our heads together” with someone else who may not necessarily have the mind of Christ that we come away imbued with concepts that are not Christian. Our thoughts, our ideas, our emotions, our choices, our impulses, drives, and desires are all shaped and molded through the exposure of our minds to other people’s minds. In our modern era of mass communication, the danger of the “mass mind” grows increasingly grave.”

He compared sharing ideas to sharing scab. A parasite sheep transfer by touching heads together in greeting. 

There is truth in his quote. But all I can think about is the great alienation and isolation of people who silently slink out of church. 

Most of the Calvarys that I attended had some flavor of this God is enough or I can do all things through Christ. Therefore, if you had enough God, you never needed a seminary degree, therapy, or antidepressants. One church I knew went so far as to say it didn’t just have to be Christian; it had to be Calvary-initiated in order to be sanctioned. This particular fellowship wouldn’t use the Awana program because it wasn’t written by a Calvary pastor. It was easy for me to live in this “We are the only ones who have the full truth” churchyard because I became a Christian in a Southern Baptist Church, which also thinks they are the only ones saved.

Am I not Christian enough for the Christian club?

The disciples had this thought, too. They wanted to stop other people from driving out demons because they weren’t in the same church clique, I mean, denomination. Interestingly, Jesus said “If they are not against us, they are for us.” He told his disciples to leave that non-sanctioned group of demon-casting believers alone. What a strange concept! That other church down the road is not against us? That public service for domestic violence, who is cleaning up the aftermath of church oppression, is not against the kingdom?! 

When you look at things of the world and find value, remember that every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father of Lights. So if it is good—it is from him. Even if it has a scary or foreign name like psychotherapy or amoxicillin.

I’ve got questions for the pharmacy and questions for the church.

Knowing those names can be lifesaving. And staying relevant to the changing tides of culture is not something to fear if you understand that God has not abandoned this generation. He didn’t abandon the previous one. And he will be faithful to this one even though they’re getting a lot of facial piercings.

Even Paul used idioms and colloquialisms, and Jesus was aware of current sociopolitical events. (Notice how Jesus didn’t rant about the world going to hell in a handbasket or how the people should feel towards Pilate. The application was for followers to look into their own lives and be changed amid their specific sociopolitical situation.)

We now know through science that our brains thrive with meditation and repetitive liturgy. So you can assume God designed it that way. He certainly knows about it because he instituted solutions for our brains in our religious disciplines. In Confronting Christianity, Rebecca McLaughlin writes in the intro, Aren’t we better off without religion, about seven biblical principles built into our church experience that benefit us. Weirdly, they have been shown to benefit humans even if they do them outside of the church experience. Things like gratitude, contentedness, and generosity. Prayer and meditation…

Lean into all of your resources. If it is good, it is from God. Should Christians use AI? Should Christians use curriculum if it was written by a different church? Should Christians read mystics or use medicine? How do we verify what is Christian-y enough?

Let me say it this way: if it benefits humanity outside of a religious context, can the church still touch it? 

Good stewards of the garden will navigate the balance between permissible and beneficial. Not letting our gifts or our resources master us, but accessing everything we need in our sphere.

Sure, you will not find your salvation in meditation, but you will not find it through a Petri dish of church attendance either.

But that’s a prevalent thought in the church. Another quote from a Shepherd looks at Psalm 23, “Some of my friends have been among the most learned and highly respected scientists and professors in the country. Yet about them there is often a strange yearning, an unsatisfied thirst that all their learning, all their knowledge, all their achievements have not satisfied. To appease the craving of their souls and emotions, men and women will turn to the arts, to culture, to music, to literary forms, trying to find fulfillment. And again, so often, these are amongst the most jaded and dejected of people.”

So I want to ask you, what happens when you find believers in the church who are also jaded and dejected? 

Just because it’s holy water, does it mean that we can’t drown?

It creates confusion when the church tells people, “you won’t be satisfied in the world,” but generations are growing up unsatisfied in the church. And you meet someone who meditates, and they are peaceful.

God can use anything in heaven or earth. Don’t avoid education or resources of the world because you only want to be moved by the Spirit. Whether you’re over-educated or over-medicated or undereducated and under-medicated, life is hard. 

You probably won’t find a quick diagnosis and corresponding pill, and you definitely won’t find a one-and-done salvation prayer to provide a life of peace and pleasure. But keep seeking. You will find. But then, you will still have to keep seeking because he’s newly needed each day. 

One of my prayer partners shared a podcast this week. Her elevator pitch was a quote where the podcaster said he was always told you don’t have to check your brain at the door to follow Jesus but over the 25 years he pastored a mega church, he realized you kinda did have to check your brain at the door to follow evangelicalism. If that resonates with you, check it out. 

If you stand on the threshold of the house he describes, and see your kids playing in the yard or street, maybe it’s time to ask, “Is this truly good?” And then let the answer change you in the midst of your cultural or sociopolitical situation. 

Uncovering Paul

Posted on by Hilarey

Soon after 9-11, my oldest came home and prayed for the Muslims because “They make their ladies cover-up their heads.” I’m not sure where he got this, but people were turning all Muslims into caricatures of chaotic evil. It is interesting that this most grievous thing was given to my six-year-old as a prayer-worthy concern.

I first wrote about questioning my pastor regarding head coverings in my post Uncovered, and lately I realize that there have been very few pastors I haven’t asked multiple questions or wanted to dialogue “Why is (this) so?” In that instance, he didn’t know. And I don’t think he really cared. I mean, it applied to a different gender, culture and time than he did. Neither did it affect his authority to operate in the church.

Recently, I found great pleasure reading the book Vindicating the Vixens: Revisiting Sexualized, Marginalized and Vilified Women of the Bible, edited by Sandra Glahn. It was so beneficial (to me) to clarify the context of several Bible stories—and it’s the same reason I’m also enjoying Paul and Gender—Reclaiming the Apostle’s Vision for Men and Women of the Church by Cynthia Long Westfall. I’ve only just started it, and like Vindicating the Vixens, the first chapter is bringing me a completely different world-view/paradigm/cultural lens to Paul.

A fiction author I love once wrote a character to say she had no problem with Jesus. It was Paul she didn’t like. My feelings bordered on mutual—but I’ve been pressing into trusting that God is good. So, if a thing isn’t good—either it isn’t from God, or it’s misunderstood. So I ask, seek, knock, clarify. Lately, that’s manifested as reading Paul and Gender and switching my Bible app to track scripture through “the life of Paul.” So I can press in for the good about his writings.

I already knew Paul’s command in 1 Corinthians 11 to keep a woman’s head covered was more about protection and equality for the first century church than keeping a modern woman subservient in a display of culturally irrelevant, historic modesty.

Still, my head covering ignorance and a western context of systemic power disparity and exclusion made the passage difficult to digest. America’s lens was refined by beliefs like “all women are born that they may acknowledge themselves as inferior in consequence to the superiority of the male sex,” from John Calvin. So of course we looked at 1 Corinthians and said, yeah—Paul wants the women’s heads covered as a symbol of male authority. Men don’t need it since they’re directly under God… See that Calvin quote, and more, compiled by a blog I follow here.

So as we chew on the meat and spit out the gristle from our Western Schism church fathers, I love how Paul and Gender paints a more wholistic backdrop. Here, I hope to lay some of it out and evoke a metaphor of my own*. This is just one take on the passage, and I think people will study it more and more—now that women can officially open a bank account. I have to remember that only happened the year I was born. This is only the first generation of people entering seminary with an inherent interest instead of “Not my gender… doesn’t affect me.”

Our American belief is that a woman would never want to cover her head. In the breathtaking book A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, the heroine receives a hijab. (My heart swells just thinking of that story.) Her initial reaction is that she feels treasured and protected. This was my first inkling of a different take on head coverings.

But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head—it is the same as having her head shaved (NIV)

Let’s set the scene of the church in Corinth. Paul and Gender said “A woman of Corinth” was a euphemism for a prostitute.

From other reading, I’ve also understood that the setting is a time and culture where men can penetrate anyone they conquer or are in charge of—and it isn’t considered rape, homosexuality or adultery. It was culturally benign for them, like a spayed or neutered humpy dog. Merely a socially acceptable display of power.

And how do they know if a particular woman is off-limits? Her hair is hidden. A veil is the signal defining which women are protected and which are sexually at risk in this city where men with money and power can dominate anyone. If this conjures #MeToo and Epstein Island…the difference is: it isn’t socially acceptable. It doesn’t sit well with us.

Additionally, the veil maintains social class order. From the women’s perspectives, it’s hierarchy showing who has value. This woman is worthy and protected. This one is lesser, usable, discardable. For sale. We know social oppression was going on because the Corinthian church was jealous and quarreling with each other. Paul suggested they were doing more harm than good when they gathered because one would be drunk and another would go hungry during the Lord’s Supper. Paul and Gender said the law forbid a slave or a prostitute from covering her hair. So imagine the social oppression of a woman who had “no right” to cover up. “Who does she think she is?”

With head-coverings, a certain kind of man can scan a room and immediately see which woman he could have, and who is off-limits. Incidentally, modern men who are terrified of androgynous and transgender clothing still make me think of the certain type of person who wants to walk into a room and quickly ascertain who he could potentially dominate. I think it makes them uncomfortable not to know who they can fight or sleep with immediately.

Ok, still building the stage. Now take the cultural example of human (not chicken) breasts. In some places in the world, a woman’s exposed breasts aren’t immodest. But use our Western sensibilities and imagine a topless (topfree) photo in a magazine or behind a paywall—a picture of a woman’s breasts makes her “available.” You can see her nakedness so you can consider having her, imagine having her, or pretend.

Take that into a house church. They’re using the language of fictive kinship, calling each other brother and sister. And, at home, mom and sis take their veils off. And some guy thinks, “I’m curious what so-and-so’s wife looks like uncovered. After all, we’re, ahem, family.”

Let’s have all the ladies take off their veils!

Now, sister, stand before the congregation. Not a bare-chested home church in Indonesia at the turn of the 19th century, but a gathering in America. You’re about to deliver a message from God, to speak and to prophesy to the congregation. But first, they want you to take off your shirt. Since many of the Corinthians believers are “lower status,” the ex (or current) sex slave you’re sitting next too—I’ve seen her naked. And you’re my family. I should see you. Now stand straight and give the message with uncovered areola and nipple.

Just let that visceral feeling you have land and settle for a minute. It might give you a bit of empathy for the forced unveiling of a Muslim woman or a first century Corinth lady.

Modesty is cultural. If the woman has never had her hair exposed, it drapes her in a sexually vulnerable, naked sensation (and possibly position, depending on the crowd.) In Corinth, it would have felt shameful to some women. As shameful as having her head shaved—the punishment for infidelity and promiscuity. Shame is a particularly difficult emotion in that it is so isolating. Flowing hair would have been highly arousing to some listeners. I imagine some brothers in the church wouldn’t even hear your message if you stood bare-chested before them—even though boobies are available to see anytime, online. (I guess for some it wouldn’t even matter if you’re covered up. They still know you have ’em and they’ll look right through your shirt!)

Now, a slave girl whose entire life has been exposed and marked by her availability, low class and low worth, stands before the crowd and speaks to a congregation. A group which possibly includes her owners. In any other context, they are her social superiors and her uncovered head is the blatant visual reminder.

Paul’s directive is “all you all” women wear veils.

Equality in the church. Protection in the church.

Paul said something different to Timothy regarding the women of Ephesus who ostentatiously flaunted wealth and status. He told them to show appropriate situational propriety in their adornments like braided hair. But to Corinth, he addresses their specific issue and says, “Here, in the gathering of believers, no one is low class. No one is unprotected. No one is sexually available. Listen to her words and don’t look at her like that, Corinthians.”

A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man (NIV)

Additionally, there’s a contrast with the directive that the men should not cover their head. Paul and Gender suggests that a man of high status would want to be invisible when in a posture of supplication. It was the cultural norm for him to cover that up. Paul says, rather, males are to be vulnerable, with their “spiritual transformation is on display.”

A man’s uncovered head doesn’t bring up sexuality to the imagination of the hearers, it lowers him from his elevated status to equal, to fellow believer. “Exchange a covering of pride for exposed humility, all you men who could dominate anyone.” This would have been as jarring as some of the other things Paul said to them, such as, “You are all the bride of Christ.”

But here’s an even lovelier thing about this letter from Paul! He gives it to the Corinthian church as a non-contentious individual church decision. Because the other churches aren’t dealing with it. Verse 16.

Paul wants the church to learn to discern and make decisions because it will one day judge the world and angels.

Paul and Gender, page 35 says, “Women and men were supposed to be learning to exercise good judgment in ordinary matters in preparation for future responsibilities. Therefore, if women were (correctly) refusing to submit to suggestions or directions to not veil or to remove their veils, the Corinthian Church needed to be convinced that women should be allowed to use their own judgment or follow their own convictions in this matter.”

How can I not love Paul for this?

Westfall also asserts that the veil is a demonstration of her choice, her authority over herself. She writes, “However, as the subject of the sentence, the nominative woman is the subject of the infinitive, the one who has authority.”

It is for this reason that a woman ought to have authority over her own head, because of the angels (NIV)

So the Corinthian head covered is a symbol of her own authority over her own head as she stands before God and the heavenly realm. This is why (counter-culturally) Paul tells a lowly slave girl to illegally wear a veil when she prophesies over the congregation in the privacy of a house church.

This unmarried girl is not veiled to signify the authority of men. She is elevated to equal status to the rest of the congregation before the Lord. Because God uses the things this world despises to shame the powerful. And she gets to make her own choice if she wants to display her hair when she edifies, strengthens, encourages, comforts and instructs the people**.

Diving into scripture like this reveals God’s intentions regarding our interdependence and treatment of each other—not to split hairs over hair scarves and cleavage. When a woman enters the four walls of your church building with more or less covering indicative of the life and culture she lives—remember:

Don’t look at her that way. Listen to her words.

*Thoughts from Paul and Gender are mingled with my own. So if there is something incorrect or irritating—assume it is me and not the book or the author.
**I was raised in a congregation and spent time in churches that believed in Cessation. Looking back now, I wonder if the doctrine has a purpose to maintain control from the top down, with the added benefit of avoiding a text which refers to women instructing men. I cannot find a compelling reason to believe in the cessation of (some) gifts, because prophecy (specifically) is the only gift that shows up in every list I can find regarding spiritual gifts. And, we’re warned to not suppress it. See 1 Corinthians 12:7-11, 27-30, Romans 12:6-8 & Ephesians 4:11-13. Keep reading the first letter to Corinthians to see details about how prophecy should look.

1 Corinthians 14
Vs 3 the one who prophesies speaks to people for their strengthening, encouraging and comfort
Vs 5 so that the church may be edified
Vs 22 it’s for believers
Vs 24-25 it’s for unbelievers to be convicted of sin, their hearts and secrets laid bare, it incites worship
Vs 29 two or three should do it taking turns, it should be weighed for truth
Vs 31 says prophecy is for instruction and encouragement, and all should have a turn

You’ll notice, a few verses later, Paul says women should be silent in church. Which contradicts Chapter 11 if you think Paul tells all women to prophesy and all women to be silent in the same letter. I assume Paul and Gender will cover this, but I haven’t gotten to it yet. The explanation I’ve previously heard is that verse 34 & 35 had to do with women who’d never previously sat in a learning environment or studied spiritual things. They were randomly interrupting the service, calling out questions across the room. He tells them to wait and go home to ask their husbands instead of being disruptive. If you get too fixated on the inerrant letter of your translation—you would think only married women get to ask clarifying questions and single women have to wonder about God until they have a husband. All of chapter 14 chapter is about removing disruptions and creating order while using tounges and prophecy, so this makes more sense than women being told not to speak unless they are prophesying, but men can interrupt willy-nilly.

A Ceremony of Grief

Posted on by Hilarey

When my husband and I were younger, I wanted to adopt. We went through two home studies. We attended classes, borrowed children’s beds, planned with our kids, and informed our neighbors. Finally, we brought in a young sibling group. Health and Welfare wanted a trial situation as part of the interview process. We didn’t finish the trial.

In the aftermath, when I was returning the crib and other items, I tried to hide my brokenness as I stood before the woman who’d loaned them. She looked at me and asked how I was “really doing” in that way of people who actually want to know—and aren’t just exchanging passing niceties. I told her I didn’t think I was doing good. “I might even feel a little…” and here is where I whispered my shame, “…depressed?”

She said, “Oh Hilarey! Of course you are. You’ve had an adoption miscarriage.” She explained that people bring casseroles for new babies but no one normally visits if you lose a baby. We mourn miscarriages alone. She also reminded me that even though I didn’t have the physical loss from my body, we had prepared our home, brains, and hearts for new family members. We had spent time (years) envisioning it and suddenly it was taken away. It was like a death had happened in our family and no one acknowledged it. Since then, if I have known of a miscarriage—I’ve tried to reach out.

A quick blessing for women in the light of Mother’s Day this weekend. Christ wept over Jerusalem and said how he longed to gather her children like a hen gathers chicks under her wings. Any desire you have inside of you to nurture, comfort, or protect—reflects the heart of God. If you have unsatisfied longings for family, you are in that phase of pouring out from your body and lacking rest and comfort for yourself, your children have moved on, or you have been rejected by those you love… May you feel the tender promise that God has not forgotten you.

Death of a dream

It was painful to release the idea of our imagined family. It can hurt to let go of any goal or dream. Recently, I’ve seen different dream-deaths in my close community. Major changes or plans of major changes. My husband moved to a new company and left the one where he’d worked for more than a decade. Even intentional changes can land you somewhere between feeling slightly unsettled to completely losing your footing in the overwhelm of irrevocable change.

Sometimes a dream dies peacefully in its sleep, and sometimes it twists and writhes like a B movie actor.

In my experience, that’s been the pain for me. The death throes. The last gasps of air when you thought the dream had already passed over. Any sudden reminders that you still want it—even though you thought you had let it go.

You don’t always know something is an idol until you cannot have it.

I used to visit with a refugee friend from Iraq who shared a verbal tradition about the story of Jonah in Nineveh. She told me that when the people realized their danger and the depth of their sin, they didn’t allow any man or animal to drink even a sip of water for three days. The mommas would not nurse their babies; they let them cry.

I didn’t believe her. I couldn’t imagine a nursing mom doing that. Forget the pain of swelling, mastitis and your milk drying up. Think of how a baby’s life at the time was already so precarious, infant mortality was likely high, a woman’s future was her progeny, and women risked so much in childbirth.

Ours wasn’t the kind of relationship where I could argue with her or express doubt, and she was so insistent. She assured me that the cows were screaming, and the entire city was wailing and crying out together as one. She’d descended from the people, so she knew.

I pulled out Jonah and reread the story. In chapter 3, verse 7 and 8 the king says, Do not let people or animals, herds or flocks, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink.

It could be literal, but nearly literal would still get the point across. What I received in the exchange was another example of where I cannot help, at least initially, to understand the Bible through the lens I have. In America, we encourage drinking plenty of water while fasting.

Recently, our church had a corporate fast for lent. The preacher kept coughing. Someone brought him a water bottle. I was sitting next to a young girl from east Africa and she looked at me with incredulous confusion. After the service, she asked, “I thought we were fasting this week.” She likely wondered why he callously tempted the entire congregation. (It was not a mandatory fast. People took part in whatever capacity they desired.) Once we talked, I discovered that in her culture, fasting meant nothing touched her lips, food or drink, sunrise to sunset. She ate and drank water at night.

It wasn’t just culture that dictated how Nineveh reacted to Jonah—but contrition. I realized I might not have experienced that kind of remorse, certainly not on such a scale. There have been many times that I’ve felt so much emotion that I wasn’t hungry… but never so much impending doom that for three days I wouldn’t even put a bowl of water in front of the cat. And that sound of my captive animal, crying out and maybe even eventually giving up in order to save energy, would resonate and echo within my soul.

But the communal experience—it would help you grieve with the sounds everywhere. And in the context of this, to mourn their pride and violence with a visceral ritual would be life-changing. You would cross over and never want to return to that sin.

I think our culture tries to hide grief. We keep uncomfortable things like disability and weakness hidden away. To the point than many people didn’t know their president, Franklin Rosevelt, was paralyzed from the waist down. Depending on your church culture, it could be worse. Because feeling pain must mean you aren’t trusting God if your religion promises finances, freedom, health and good married sex when you obey him. You can be sad about it for a minute… but now, where is your joy in the Lord? Haven’t you learned what you needed to from that trial yet, so it can be over?

Of course, some people never leave their pain to the point of wearing it as an identity. I know I have been on all sides of this. Either wondering why someone is still wallowing, hiding how I am not yet better, or letting my loss influence everything I say, do, and think. So we isolate.

Sometimes you need to grieve. And grief takes time. Your time, not someone else’s.

When you can’t move out of the grief

But sometimes the pain is just keeping something already dead connected to a machine. It’s clinging to the way you wish things were. I think we also refuse to mourn because either we hold the dream up higher than what God has for us, or we don’t want to admit failure.

I want to suggest that releasing a dream will be less painful than the alternatives of living in delusion or cultivating a deep root of bitterness.

I see now why some cultures hired mourners to wail at the home where a death had taken place. To voice your own heart-cry and legitimize the pain enough to let it pass. So that when you have mourned, you cross over. You stand up and wash your face. You do not camp in the slightly hidden shame of unprocessed grief.

Lisa Terkeurst writes in the last chapter of her book Good Boundaries and Goodbyes about this when she mentions having “a million little funerals” and opening up her hands to let each one go.

We have very little ceremony to mark the passing of something other than actual death, as a healthy way to grieve. Sometimes we don’t even know we need to mourn the release of a dream.

What I am proposing is to find a ritual to let something go. A sort of liturgy or ceremony to mark an ending. We have ceremonies for weddings and baptisms to show before and after. I think it might be worth creating a way to pass over the threshold and acknowledge the change when a dream dies.

Create a visual reminder of the change in your life. Light a candle, or blow one out, write a ditty, bake a cake, hang a banner… or throw a wake. And do it with your community.

Here is the way Mike Meyer’s character in So I Married an Axe Murderer mourned the end of his relationships:


It’s Probably Her Fault

Posted on by Hilarey

I loved the first cover of my first novel. Partly because, 11 years ago, it communicated to the reader: this isn’t going to be your typical Christian fiction. I didn’t want to bait and switch.

I knew it hit the mark when I participated in a Christian fair at a community park. I set up a bookseller’s table with a few of my writer friends. An angry, sweaty-faced man stormed up with his pubescent daughter, picked up my book and started yelling at her with an extended finger. “You asked what the pastor meant by immodest! This is immodest. This is… alluring!”

He went on to belittle her for men’s lust. Then he turned and leveled his disgusted gaze towards me. He would not hand me the book, but dropped it on the table with a derisive smirk (he showed me!) and marched her away in tears. She turned ashamed eyes back toward me for a moment, so apologetic for her crime of being a girl.

Drink more water or it’s your fault

In my youth, I heard water neutralizes an acid stomach. And on the flip side, sometimes pain in your stomach meant not enough acid. Which, of course, water also helps. I think there was a thread of “pain is a construct of your mind” philosophy also woven into that. The point was: you never actually needed antacids. You just needed to drink more water. Pain was probably your fault.

When I finally broke down and bought Tums, I still felt guilt that I had eaten the wrong things. Eaten too fast. I hadn’t had enough water.

We create these rules in our minds as a sort of safekeeping. To throw out to the universe, “That would never happen to me!” and “Look, see, how I have protected myself. I followed a rule!” When others suffer, we blame. You must not have followed a rule. It’s your fault.

It’s either my fault or your fault

Every time I hear a man say that he wishes women would be sensitive and “put a little more clothing on.” I die a little inside. But… only if he’s a believer.

What he’s saying is, “It’s the women you gave us, Lord!” He is trying to make someone else responsible, so his external situations can allow him to believe that he has relinquished his inner life over to God.

Cultural modesty does not prevent rape, so what do you mean by covered up?

I laughed a little when my uncle first told me he was “a conservative Christian.” In my mind, I thought, dude, you’re from California. You don’t know what conservative is. You let your wife wear pants. (I realize now this is a political alignment, and not an expression of faith.)

Should a woman hide her shoulders so LDS men know she’s wearing garments, sealed in the temple to someone else?

Can a woman show that she has two legs like a man? I loved the exchange in the novel, The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver. The missionary tried to get the African women to cover their naked breasts according to his cultural sensitivity (quite an inconvenience to nursing and working at the same time) while his wife wore pants and the men of the village couldn’t look her in the eye. They appropriately bounced their gaze away.

If you’re in certain parts of the world, maybe she needs to cover her hair. Or become as pious as a Hasidic Jew, shave her hair and wear a wig, so no one accidentally views the immodest glory of her natural hair. Surely that will make it easier for men to praise God for their maleness.

I’ve likely written before that in the autobiography Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali describes how the need to hide and sequester her womanhood never ended—only escalated—in her submission. Even fully hidden from view with a veil obscuring her face, men’s lust arose from the sound of her walking. The echo of her womanly shoes tapping down the hall brought up images of shapely legs, so her equally pious male friend asked her to wear soft-soled shoes.

‘Ezer a guy out, all you fine helper people. It’s really hard not to sin.

There’s nothing a helper can do to make it easier for him to turn his heart, mind, and soul over to God. Not even drinking more water.

I don’t care about outside the church or the unbelieving culture at large. It only bothers me in the body. And it seems more prevalent to me the more that roles and gender are segregated in the church.

I used to not care so much about equality or women who preached because I do not desire to pastor. My hot button was abuse due to those roles. But I’m to the point that whenever I hear the term “male leadership” or “husbands, lead your wife,” I cringe because none are free when power discrepancy is justified scripturally.

The more the man views himself as set apart, and the more gender-based responsibility he assumes… the more she is lowered from a divine image bearer to his object. Possibly a treasured object under his loving care to whom he will wash the feet of, and give his life up for, yes—but an object of his, nonetheless.

And I don’t think Jesus’s intent when he said “when you look at a woman with lust you have already sinned” means a man should remove her from his line of sight instead of submitting his heart. I mean, he should both submit to God and submit to women out of reverence to Christ.

If you’re afraid you’re going to pinch the tush of every female you see in the memory care facility during your senility—then view all women as your sister/daughters now, in the secret places of your reasoning. I heard a pastor once say that if you put a muzzle on a mean dog, you still have a mean dog. And I think during old age, we lose some muzzles of society. Hiding less of my sarcastic thoughts now that I’m fifty is a perfect example.

Neither should he keep women from the inner sanctum/lair because of the reminder that her sex difference is a portable temptation to him. Soft-soled shoes won’t remove lust just because she is neither seen nor heard. I wonder if, like objectification, the segregation of gender roles, and the ardent belief that men and women cannot be friends (because her organs dictate her one role) actually exasperates lust.

I know that belief contributes to the deep pain of the childless in the church. She is your friend, too. I have some close friends that might argue this point with me. But I think unpracticed interaction and segregation breeds, “She smiled at me. That means she probably wants to have sex with me,” as much as it reveals how the core belief of inequality spreads its tentacles into all interactions. Approaching an unavailable woman shows your belief that females have one function for you.

Sister, there is no way to prevent someone else from sinning against you. And if men will not see women as equal standing in the body of Christ, segregating or deferring to the gender at large will not change it. Differences are needed in community.

How to change it? Step up.

I believe using your gifting, according to your faith, and in whatever space will allow you, will move things. When we arrived in Israel for our tour, our Southern Baptist pastor raised his eyebrows at me and said “The tour guide is a woman?! Uh oh. We’ll see how this goes…” I was so annoyed that I, out of the whole group, was the one to whom he showed his prejudice.

Her people had escaped the Spanish inquisition. She was a born-again Jewess, living in the holy land and her family had practiced Jewish traditions and rituals her whole life. She had intimate knowledge of things like the Passover supper and which coins were exchanged in the first century temple. She spoke three languages. But she had this one thing against her—a uterus. At the end of the tour, our pastor asked his “heavy hitters” to kick in a little more money. He wanted to pay her extra because of her unanticipated value: she didn’t hold back her teaching.

As we’re being conformed to the image of Christ, we should not should stop trying to renew our minds or move toward the new kingdom. The kingdom where both men and women are now the priests of God, fully endowed with all the gifts of the spirit to shine light, regardless of our unique organs related to procreation.

And (this is only for the men who lead through gender instead of spirit-gifting) when you think of yourself as the head of everything—realize how often you ask her to step in for you. How you create a paradigm where you declare you are the leader, but are not empowered through gender alone, so you blame the girls.

Give your husband sex and then he’ll be faithful to you.
Take care of your body and then he’ll be attracted to you.
Dress modestly, then he will see you as a sister.
Submit first, then he will love you.
If you follow him, then he will lead.

I don’t think this is a problem for humans who weren’t raised in the church. I don’t think it’s an issue for girls who weren’t told, “Men only want one thing from you. Girls have (only) one precious gift. One thing of value.”

And I also don’t believe it’s a problem for men who view women as equal.

Back ordered and out-of-print Christianity

Movements sell books. I think much of the purity movement was people who rejected the sexual freedom of their youth. They over-corrected, and wanted a rule to corral suffering this side of heaven—to blame pain and dysfunction on something that could be controlled. Drink more water and it won’t be your fault! Or, they wanted absolution: I didn’t know the rule—so it wasn’t my fault. They wanted to redeem their virginity through their children and so promised them a false god, a sexual prosperity that they had no intimate knowledge of.

How we long for simple, descriptive, reproducible formulas! Tweetable existentialism. A theology with a man’s name on it.

I used to dismiss Jehovah’s Witnesses because (to my understanding) they weren’t allowed to read the Bible unless they viewed it through the lens of the Watchtower’s interpretation and accompanying literature. At least they are honest in their gatekeeping.

Now, I realize it’s the same in our churchyard. So much of what we peddle for book sales is a tangent to the gospel; slapping a man’s last name on our affiliation and pledging allegiance to it. We search for commentaries that explain what we want to believe. Or we sit under people who write commentaries that prove what we want to believe. One human cannot accurately contain all the deep mysteries of God—we were designed for community. So even if it that doctrine has sustained a couple hundred years, parts of it will be wind and its followers the reeds.

Making the straight and narrow, straighter and narrower since 1845

The Southern Baptist faction began for segregation. Churches were allowing non-whites in their congregations and they wanted to keep the truer faith of the good ol’ days. I was raised in the faith and given a hearty fear of liberal sects like the American Baptists. Now, as an adult, I’m becoming increasingly averse to historical denominations, dogma containing surnames, and movements. No matter how new, no matter how old. The dividing walls are not just gender, but a more systemic problem of gatekeeping and control of the money machine.

The other morning I read a blog by a woman who wrote a disclaimer that she was, after all, still Eve‘s daughter. She was diminishing God’s ability to speak truth through her since she believed all women were fundamentally more likely to be deceived. The theology she puts her faith in sells a lot of books and has for centuries. It was like saying, “I wish I could ask a man about this—since I can’t trust my lady-brain. Unfortunately, every time I try to, he thinks I want to sleep with him.”

The real upset is when laypeople and uneducated start digging. Even worse, armchair theologians like me reading the Bible and trying to parse out truth. As my dad reminded me, “Well, anyone can put up a blog.”

William Tyndale was executed because he translated directly from Greek and Hebrew instead of the church-authorized Latin Vulgate. The original texts undermined key doctrines of The Church. Plus, he translated into the English common tongue. The educated couldn’t fathom someone as a lowly as a plow-hand understanding holy scripture.

If no one is making money off it—is it really a valid doctrine?

Back when I thought I was called to be a missionary, I came across a lovely little book by Amy Carmichael, called Mimosa. It is the story of a young girl who hears the simplest of gospel messages one afternoon and receives it. The family could only send one child to the missionary school, so she returned home.

She grows up, becomes a wife and a mother and spends her life in a village far away from any Christians, the Bible, or Christian culture. She’s reunited to the writer decades later—only to find that with this tiny seed of God’s love for her, she’d lived a life convicted of, and in obedience to, many biblical concepts that directly opposed the culture of India where she made her home. Simple things like, it didn’t honor the God who loved her to go into debt she couldn’t repay. And big things, like trust in the Almighty for an empty belly.

I wonder about all the time I spend pondering women’s roles in the American church, when so many in the world don’t have access to “drink more water.” I’m sure we give too much effort talking about concepts, and laminating membership cards to Apollos or Paul, when, if we were just moving around outside in the world—the Holy Spirit would tell us how to take the next step.

But on the flip side, as we watch the exodus of believers who leave wounded and disillusioned from faith spaces, maybe it’s time for more armchair theologians to examine the dogma of our tradition.

And here is where it lands so heavy on me. No one questions your gifting when you are ministering outside the churchyard. The only place any of this applies is inside the building with a logo and a security team, where you can buy their books.